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Professor Stephen Hawking

World-famous theoretical physicist who could not move his body but whose mind wandered the universe and thought in 11 dimensions

Stephen Hawking in Cambridge in 2013KARWAI TANG/GETTY IMAGES

The Times, March 14 2018, 4:15am

In 1964 a lecture at the Royal Society was rudely interrupted. Fred Hoyle, a titan of physics and a firm opponent of the big bang theory of creation, had been presenting his latest research. From the back, from a young and visibly shaking man, came the shout: “You’re wrong!” Hoyle, furious, asked the man why. He replied: “I’ve worked it out.”

The young man was Stephen Hawking and he was shaking not from fear, but because of illness. Suffering from motor neurone disease, according to the best medical estimates at the time he had two years to live.

In the 54 years that followed, not only did Hawking not die, intellectually he thrived. Although his arguments in 1964 did not do much to worry Hoyle,…